[MD] Experience, essentialism, physicalism

[Matt Kundert]

DMB, David,

I'm just going to slot together the last few days of posts for response here 
(beginning with DMB's March 3rd post in the old thread name to DMB's March 
5th post with the new thread name).

DMB said (Mar. 3):
As I understand it, the deductions (sq) are secondary in a temporal sense, 
but I don't think this has anything to do with the difference between 
rhetoric and dialectic or between metaphorical and literal forms of 
expression. I think these deductions are temporal and secondary in the sense 
that they are not the first step in a cognitive process, but I'm not talking 
about cultural transitions in historical time or anything like that. ... Its 
called primary because it is the first and most basic kind of experience we 
know, not because its better or more real. It is called pre-intellectual for 
the same reason, it comes before intellectual interpretations.

Matt:
Sure, I was using temporal in both senses, in the cognitive process and in 
historical time.  It's basically the learning of language, which we can 
trace through a baby or through humanity's evolution.  So, if you're saying 
that primary experience should only be understood as temporally primary, how 
does that square with the identification of primary experience with DQ, and 
DQ's identification as, all other things being equal, better than static 
patterns?  (This was always the nit that made my hair stand on end, and is 
why I start distinguishing between different senses of DQ and the like.)

DMB said (Mar. 3):
I'm not really following your map analogies here, but let me address this 
question about "knowledge of primary experience"? Did I use that weird 
phrase?  Anyway, if knowledge is intellectual by definition, then knowledge 
of the pre-intellectual experience is impossible. I think this is what it 
means to say that this experience can't be intellectually known and what it 
means to say that Quality can't be defined. ... Does that seem like a 
contradiction to say that the pre-intellectual experience can be known in 
experience, but can't be defined or intellectually known? The only way that 
would be a contradiction would be to assert that there is only one kind of 
knowledge. Is that what a language idealist would say, that all knowledge is 
linquistic? In the MOQ, that would mean that we can only have static 
knowledge about static things. Or something like that. Anyway, I think the 
MOQ is saying there is more than one kind of knowing, more than one category 
of experience. Among other things, I think the analogy of the menu and the 
food is mostly about that. The food and the menu are both real and they're 
both valuable, the problem comes when somebody gets confused and tries to 
read the food or eat the menu.

Matt:
Okay, so you basically agree that, _if_ we define knowledge as intellectual, 
then "we can only have static knowledge of static things."  What I'm still 
not sure of is what it means to say that we have, so to speak, Dynamic 
knowledge of Dynamic Quality.  What does it mean to "know" Dynamic Quality, 
when "knowing" in this sense has nothing to do with "knowing" (and 
knowledge) in the static sense?  And how do the two "interact"?  Do they 
interact only in a temporal sense (first comes one, then the other)?  (The 
only reason I introduced the "weird" locution "knowledge of primary 
experience" is because you've asserted against my definition of knowledge as 
static patterns, secondary experience, that we can know primary experience.  
I'm trying to figure out what that means.  Because my inclination is to say 
that we _have_ primary experiences, but knowing is something done by 
linguistic use.)

David said (Mar. 4):
Well the bias I suspect in your emphasis sounds a bit Platonic to me, the 
emphasis on theoretical knowledge and making maps seems a bit removed from 
practical experience and getting your hands dirty, i.e.  the tradition's 
elitism and other worldliness/transcendence seems to be hanging around 
still.

Matt:
I was just using the analogy provided by Pirsig (an analogy you picked up 
and used straight after I did, by the way).  It seems handy, and considering 
I think language is the map and language is analogous to a limb or any other 
tool, no doubt our maps are going to get dirty.  Language is just one of the 
tools we use to make our way about the world.

DMB said (Mar. 4):
Please explain how it is the MOQ can go to such great lengths to defeat the 
metaphysics of substance and yet fail to defeat physicalism? Isn't that just 
something like materialism without the certainty, without the objectivity?

Matt:
The problem I've always had with Pirsig's use of substance is that 
"substance," in philosophy, has never universally denoted "matter."  In the 
Cartesian, S/O, problematic there were _two_ substances, mind and matter, 
not just one, matter.  The root of the problem of substance is about 
essentialism.  Under that understanding, Pirsig's defeat of the metaphysics 
of substance doesn't necessarily effect physicalism because physicalism 
isn't necessarily essentialistic.

David sometimes agrees with me (as when he wrote about the "physicalist 
story of evolution"), sometimes he doesn't (as when he says antiessentialism 
is "hard to square with physicalism").  But all we should take physicalism 
to mean is "microstructural explanations of events."  All that means is 
"whatever it is they do in physics, chemistry, biology, etc."  The trouble 
I've always had with your attacks on my non-reductive physicalism is that 
I've never understood how, if you agree that whatever it is they do in 
physics, chemistry, biology, etc., is useful, then how you are _not_ 
physicalist in the same sense that I am.

So, say we define essentialism this way: "the view that there is a single, 
correct explanation for any given thing (be it rocks, ideas, truth, poems, 
etc.)."

Say we define physicalism this way: "the view that things can be explained 
in microstructural terms."

Essentialistic physicalism would indeed be the scientific materialism, the 
view that the correct explanation of anything is a microstructural one, that 
Pirsig rails against and is indeed the way the Oxford Dictionary defined 
physicalism.  Non-reductive physicalism, however, simply says, "Science's 
microstructural terms can be useful."  You want to say that science's 
explanations aren't much help with spiritual enlightenment.  I can only 
agree.  The thing that allows us to _not_ throw out physics is our common 
antiessentialism.  Once one becomes antiessentialistic, antireductive, then 
all vocabularies lose there status as getting past appearances to reality 
because we've dropped that distinction.  Whatever form of mysticism you 
favor doesn't get at reality or essence anymore than physics.  Once one 
becomes an antiessentialist (a pragmatist), any particular way of speaking, 
any particular vocabulary (be it physics, Buddhism, Christianity, or 
Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality), becomes useful for certain particular 
purposes.  Physics textbooks are useful for rocks, Pirsig's texts useful for 
spiritual enlightenment.

In other words, my answer to your question above, "how is it the MOQ can go 
to such great lengths to defeat the metaphysics of substance and yet fail to 
defeat physicalism?", is that Pirsig isn't _trying_ to defeat physicalism 
cum microstructural explanation.  He's just trying to defeat reductionism.  
Pirsig is perfectly comfortable with physical explanations of rocks and 
such.  What he isn't comfortable with is philosophers of science (and 
know-nothing scientists themselves) who say, "And this is all there is.  
This is how reality really is."  Pirsig _likes_ evolution, he likes physics. 
  He just wants to supplement, as David put it, the "physicalist story of 
evolution" with an "experiental story of [cultural] evolution and how ever 
changing maps have dragged us up from single cell forms of life."

Another way to put this is to take up your description of Pirsig's 
philosophy as "a heavy duty
form of idealism."  (I've moved on to your March 5th post.)  The thing I 
would want to suggest is that Pirsig's philosophy is _not_ a heavy duty form 
of idealism insofar as Pirsig should not be seen as claiming that this is 
all in our heads.  As you say, "Now I don't think he's saying that planets 
and
stars and the big bang were somehow actually produced by our deductions."  
What you are saying is that _everything_ is a deduction, every _thing_ is 
redescribed as a deduction.  I think this produces the same effect as when 
James claims that the trail of the human serpent covers all.  We can't pull 
off the human from the non-human.  What that does _not_ mean is that 
everything is an idea.  To qualify what you want to call his idealism, 
Pirsig distinguishes between ideas/deductions that are "physical" and those 
that are not, the effect of naming the inorganic and biological levels the 
old "object" and the social and intellectual levels the old "subject."  
Pirsig is still leaving a place for physics and biology and insofar as he 
does that, he's a physicalist in the sense I defined above.  What he is not 
is a reductionist, which is why he produces the discrete levels.

To try and sum up, this is why I've read Pirsig as primarily attacking the 
appearance/reality distinction.  Once you ditch that distinction, science 
and art and morality all fall on an epistemological par.  They all have 
their uses.  What was wrong with science was not _science_, but philosophy 
of science, modern philosophy that came out of reaction to the New Science 
during the 17th century and said that science got at the way things really 
were.  Science is physicalism.  Philosophers are the ones who keep tacking 
on reductionism, keeping tacking on the appearance/reality distinction so 
that they can say that _this_ way of describing things is the correct and 
_only_ way of describing things.  The universe is _only_ bouncing atoms in a 
void and the like.  Pirsig sees nothing wrong with the work of scientists.  
They are quite good at what they do.  As I see it, Pirsig just wants to 
clear up the philosophical space around the work of scientists so we aren't 
saying silly things like, "Values aren't real because they aren't bouncing 
particles."

Matt

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